Transgender Kansas Citians Face Rising Restrictions and Mounting Concern

By Suzanne King

Suzanne Wheeler and her spouse don’t wish to depart the Kansas Metropolis space, their eight grownup kids and their seven grandchildren. They don’t wish to stroll away from their buddies, their neighborhood and their help system.

However they’re planning nonetheless.

The center-aged transgender couple already purchased property in Portugal, the place transgender rights are extra protected. And they’re able to go when obligatory.

“I don’t want to leave my country,” mentioned Wheeler, a retired U.S. Military colonel. “I spent my entire life supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States. But the situation that we have at hand — I may have to.”

Kansas Metropolis’s transgender neighborhood is sandwiched between two states the place Republican-controlled legislatures have made limiting transgender well being care and different rights a prime precedence. Now that President Donald Trump has returned to the White Home, an onslaught is coming on the federal degree, too, with govt orders which will portend curtailed transgender rights and entry to care throughout the nation.

Members of Kansas Metropolis’s transgender neighborhood mentioned they fear most about rising limits on well being care — even for transgender adults — and about new guidelines that might forestall them from having driver’s licenses and passports that precisely replicate their gender, placing their security in danger.

“It’s a really tough environment to be trans or to be raising trans kids these days,” mentioned Shira Berkowitz, senior director for public coverage with PROMO, a Missouri LGBTQ rights group.

The wave of laws and different insurance policies, they mentioned, seem like a calculated push for “the erasure of transgender people from society.”

Proposed legal guidelines and new legal guidelines

Fewer than 4% of Missouri adults establish as LGBTQ, in accordance with the nonprofit Motion Development Venture, and a fair slimmer proportion establish as transgender. (It’s solely 0.5% of individuals nationwide.) But 56 payments launched within the Missouri Normal Meeting this yr would legislate some side of transgender life.

That’s greater than in each different state besides Texas, the place 66 payments aimed on the trans neighborhood had been launched, in accordance with a tally saved by journalist Erin Reed, who follows transgender points on her weblog Erin within the Morning.

The Missouri payments are wide-ranging, together with:

Driver’s license restrictions that require utilizing an individual’s gender assigned at start.
Toilet bans that dictate which loos transgender persons are allowed to make use of within the state.
Constitutional amendments that outlaw gender-affirming look after minors together with abortion.
And one invoice, which defines “sex” solely as “an individual’s reproductive biology at birth,” threatening protections towards discrimination for transgender individuals.

The lengthy record of laws within the state additionally contains a number of payments targeted totally on extending Missouri’s ban on gender-affirming look after individuals youthful than 18 and persevering with a ban on transgender youth enjoying sports activities for groups that match their gender identification. Each of these legal guidelines handed in 2023 however have a 2027 expiration date.

Lawmakers who help restrictions to gender-affirming care — together with puberty blockers, hormone alternative remedy and surgical procedures — argue that kids might be irreparably harmed by therapies and later remorse getting them. However there’s widespread settlement within the medical neighborhood that gender blockers, the most typical medical therapy given to kids, merely pause puberty however don’t trigger everlasting change. Surgical procedure is exceedingly uncommon amongst kids youthful than 18.

In Kansas, 5 payments focusing on transgender points had been launched this yr. The massive one, banning gender-affirming look after Kansans youthful than 18, handed on Feb. 18, over Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto.

The Kansas invoice bans beneficial medical therapies and social transitioning, which critics say may prohibit academics from utilizing a pupil’s most well-liked pronouns in school.

If the Kansas ban stands as much as a court docket problem, it’s anticipated to take impact quickly, though individuals already receiving care have till 2026 to cease care. The brand new legislation means Kansas Metropolis households with transgender kids will seemingly look to states farther away the place the care stays authorized.

However these states are shrinking in quantity. Twenty-seven states have banned gender-affirming look after minors, so suppliers can have lengthy waits. And entry may grow to be much more restricted if the White Home has its approach.

In January, Trump issued an govt order meant to restrict look after individuals youthful than 19 by proscribing federal funding. The order, which has been briefly blocked in federal court docket, already prompted some suppliers in states the place care remains to be authorized to preemptively cease providing it.

Cait Smith, director of LGBTQI+ coverage with the Middle for American Progress, mentioned typically legal guidelines and guidelines are written to be so complicated or cumbersome that insurers or suppliers simply give in.

“They feel hard to implement,” Smith mentioned.

That’s what occurred with Missouri’s 2023 legislation, which included a grandfather clause to permit minors already receiving care to proceed. However as a substitute of attempting to determine which sufferers had been eligible and which weren’t, gender care suppliers moved throughout state traces or stopped the care altogether.

That’s a technique lawmakers and politicians could attempt to put a halt to grownup care, Smith mentioned.

Limiting funding and creating burdensome necessities which can be costly and tough to implement is one other risk. That might embody requiring clinics to have hallways a sure width or forcing sufferers to go to a clinic each time they want a hormone therapy as a substitute of simply taking it at residence.

“It could be very similar to attempts to curtail access to abortion care,” Smith mentioned.

Missouri Lawyer Normal Andrew Bailey issued a sweeping rule in 2023 that will have banned all gender-affirming care — for adults and youngsters. After a choose blocked the order and the Missouri legislature handed the ban on minor care, Bailey withdrew the order.

Life-saving care isn’t an possibility

Gender dysphoria is the medical analysis used to explain the psychological misery somebody who’s transgender could expertise. Main medical organizations, together with the American Academy of Pediatrics, agree that care is medically obligatory and saves lives.

A 2023 examine by the Williams Institute discovered that 42% of transgender adults within the U.S. had tried suicide, whereas 81% of trans adults had thought of it. And the Trevor Venture, a nationwide group that gives psychological well being providers for LGBTQ youth, discovered a 72% improve in suicide makes an attempt amongst trans and nonbinary youth between 2018 and 2022, a interval when 19 states, together with Missouri and Kansas, applied anti-transgender legal guidelines.

Calls and texts to the Trevor Venture’s disaster line jumped 700% the day after the November basic election and have seen “significant increases” since Inauguration Day.

Hazel Krebs, a transgender writer and speaker who lives within the Kansas Metropolis space, battled substance abuse and struggled with psychological well being points earlier than transitioning to feminine when she was 39. In 2018, she tried to kill herself.

Being able to transition, Krebs mentioned, saved her life. Now, at 43, she’s pleased.

“It’s because I’m trans,” she mentioned. “It’s all because I found out who I am. It’s all because I get to be me.”

Giving up gender-affirming care as some politicians may direct would by no means be an possibility, she mentioned.

Karen, a Kansas Metropolis mom, mentioned her transgender daughter wouldn’t be right here with out care. Karen, who requested that solely her first title be used to guard her household’s privateness, found her daughter, who’s now an grownup, attempting to kill herself when she was an adolescent. Earlier than she transitioned, she was by no means pleased.

“She would barely talk,” Karen mentioned. “She would barely engage with anyone or anything.”

Years later, Karen understands clearly that serving to her daughter transition was the one possibility. However that doesn’t imply it was straightforward when her daughter instructed her as a younger teenager that she was transgender.

“It took us many years to wrap our heads around what transgender is,” she mentioned. “It’s not an easy thing. It’s complicated. … When this first happened to us, I’m praying, ‘Lord, what kind of joke is this? What are you doing to me? What am I supposed to do?’”

However just lately, after her daughter, now 25, went by way of gender-affirming surgical procedure, Karen noticed her take a selfie for the primary time.

“That’s when we knew,” she mentioned.

Phrases do harm: psychological well being worries

The various payments and threats to gender-affirming care are damaging to transgender individuals who have fought to grow to be who they’re, mentioned James Moran, director of training and public relations with Our Spot KC, a nonprofit that gives housing and different providers to individuals within the LGBTQ neighborhood.

The potential harm doesn’t cease with the legal guidelines and govt orders that go into impact, Moran mentioned. The fixed din of debate about transgender individuals’s proper to exist does actual harm, too. And it amplifies worry and misunderstanding, Moran mentioned.

“That makes it easier to demonize and dehumanize,” Moran mentioned.

Krebs mentioned she used to really feel fairly protected strolling round Kansas Metropolis, the place in 2023 the Metropolis Council adopted a decision designating town as a protected haven for gender-affirming care. However that has modified because the election.

“My geographic circle has shrunk quite a bit,” she mentioned.

On the identical time, she sees extra individuals who aren’t transgender exhibiting help and realizing how a lot of a backlash she and different transgender persons are going through. She believes many individuals are noticing that the fixed derision towards transgender individuals is supposed to create a distraction.

“I have confidence that the populace is smart enough to see that and they’ll say, ‘Stop talking about trans people and start solving the problems,’” Krebs mentioned.

Krebs mentioned she nearly left Kansas when the state modified ID necessities, forcing her to have an “M” for male on her drivers license. However then she realized that many transgender individuals couldn’t afford the choice of leaving.

“That was a wake-up call that I just need to be here,” she mentioned. “My personality is such that I’m in front of people. I’m willing to talk to reporters. There’s not enough of that.”

Karen mentioned she and her household are planning to go away. She has come to imagine that attempting to make change in Missouri is simply too tough. In a blue state, she hopes, she could be a information for individuals who want to flee a spot the place legal guidelines have grow to be too restrictive.

“If (Democratic presidential candidate Kamala) Harris had won, we probably would have stayed for a little bit longer,” she mentioned. “But I’ve felt for a long time it’s very difficult to fight in Missouri.”

Wheeler mentioned she is going to lastly depart Kansas when she will’t get well being care or when the federal government forces her to alter her gender on her authorities IDs.

“Those are my personal triggers,” she mentioned.

She’s nonetheless hoping they received’t occur.

Outdoors her suburban Kansas residence, an American flag waves from atop a 20-foot flagpole. Wheeler loves the nation she spent her profession defending. But it surely’s changing into a spot the place she not feels protected.

“I’m nearing 60,” she mentioned. “I don’t want to leave my country. I don’t want to leave my home …. People have lost their minds about ‘gender ideology.’ It’s not an ideology. We’re not an ideology. We’re people. Nobody asked for this.”

This text first appeared on Beacon: Missouri and is republished right here beneath a Artistic Commons license. iconbeacon PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: perform() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://thebeaconnews.org/stories/2025/02/21/transgender-kansas-citians-face-growing-restrictions-and-mounting-fear/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } }

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This story was initially revealed by The Kansas Metropolis Beacon, a web-based information outlet targeted on native, in-depth journalism within the public curiosity.

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